"One more animal-- end of story"

Spoiler Warning: Contains stuff from page 107

One of the things that jumped out at me as I read the chapter "On The Rainy River" was the idea of bravery. When in the boat with Elroy, O'Brien experiences a kind of "moral freeze" (57). He can't decide whether to stay in America, the place he knows, and be shipped off to Vietnam, or to jump ship and swim to the Canadian shore, which he can see from the boat. Plagued by indecision, O'Brien stays where he is in the boat, eventually heading back to America with Elroy. At the end of the chapter, O'Brien characterizes his inertia as cowardice. "I was a coward," he says. "I went to war" (61).
Later in the novel, Rat Kiley recounts the story of Mary Anne in much the same way. He says, "The girl joined the zoo. One more animal--end of story" (107). In Kiley's definition of bravery, the choice to join the Green Berets was a cowardly, or at least unoriginal decision on Mary Anne's part. Her violent tendencies make her an animal in his eyes. In other ways, however, Mary Anne is extremely brave in her choice to join the Green Berets. Oppressed all of her life by a small, suburban worldview, and especially limited because she is a woman, Mary Anne shows great bravery and innovation in her decision not to leave Vietnam.
Therein lies the crux of O'Brien's "Moral freeze." There are as many sides to every story as there are definitions of bravery. While in some ways, it is cowardly for both Mary Anne and Tim to choose to fight in the Vietnam war, it is also extremely brave. O'Brien's inability to act in "On The Rainy River" stems not from his own cowardice, then, but from the impossibility of deciding what the "right" choice is amidst so many definitions of right.